Rochester, NY – Mayoral candidate James Sheppard today called Mayor Lovely Warren’s educational record a “failure of integrity and leadership,” citing the delays in construction of the Monroe High School campus that have forced students to spend an additional year on the John Marshall campus in Northwest Rochester.

“This did not have to happen,” Sheppard said. “Lovely Warren was so busy trying to dismantle the Schools Modernization project that she single-handedly caused this project to fall apart. Students should be going back to school at Monroe this week. Instead, they are taking the bus across town to Marshall, and their families continue to wonder how long it will be before they can get back to normal.”

Last year, Warren’s move to replace Facilities Board members and reject money-saving Project Labor Agreements sent the multi-billion dollar effort to modernize City schools into months of contract renegotiations, unnecessary lawsuits, and court time. The result? Continued delays and more taxpayer money wasted.

Mayor Warren claimed that she wanted changes in the Schools Modernization project last year to improve minority hiring, despite the fact that independent auditors found that contractors had been exceeding the 30% MWBE goals. Given last week’s Democrat and Chronicle article that outlined the Warren Administration’s efforts to change an internal audit to make their own MWBE hiring record look better, Sheppard called Warren’s actions doubly shameful.

“For many of our students, school is the place they come to for stability,” Sheppard said. “And families have a hard enough time without having to worry about where their children will be going every year. Treating them like pawns in a chess game so that Mayor Warren can control this project is just plain wrong.”